Men in Blazers Mood Table (Beep Bop Bow Beep)

A version of this article originally appeared in the DEC. 8 issue of our newsletter, The Raven. Subscribe HERE.

Last month, we unveiled a project that has been rattling around our bald, hollow heads for years. A Premier League table, based not on points, but on the mood of each club’s collective fan base at the final whistle of their last game. Last month, the Men in Blazers Mood Table became a reality. This week’s table sees Everton surge from worst to first thanks to Big Sam’s 2 - 0 debut win over Huddersfield. The Big Sam Bounce, one that’s a 10, regardless of Richter Scale.

Since launching the Mood Table last month, we’ve received a lot of questions. Who? When? Why? Whither? We are happy to say that this human triumph came to fruition, like so much of what we do, thanks to a GFOP. Matt Gordon is a Spurs fan from Lexington, Ky. He is also a data architect and consultant (Here’s what that means: 1. He designs hardware and software to store data. B. He uses that data to answer questions and make business decisions. iii. He is smarter than us.) for a company called DMI, which is actually helping out with this project. Check them on Twitter, HERE.

Football hasn’t always been Matt’s sport of choice. But when his son was born in 2009, he found himself up at odd hours with not many viewing options. So he turned on Premier League coverage. In need of a team, he put the question out to soccer converts. He wanted a side that could play nice stuff, but wasn’t a bandwagon club. The answer, for better or worse, came back a resounding... Spurs.

Fast forward eight years and Matt is full-on hooked, a co-chairman of Lexington Spurs, leader of American Outlaws Lexington, and a consumer of our crap. While catching up on Pods during a work road trip in October, he heard us bandying around the idea of the Mood Table, and being a person of action, rather than token gestures, he tried it.

Here’s how it works: Matt setup a program that collects all Tweets containing a club’s official Twitter handle sent within roughly 5 minutes of either side of the final whistle of that team’s latest match. The program then scores those Tweets based on the positivity or negativity of the language. Each team receives a score based on their fans’ collective optimism/pessimism. They are then ranked to make the Mood Table. For those slightly more technically-inclined, Matt has a blog that explains this at a high-level HERE. For those very technically-inclined, a deep dive can be found HERE. These went live just before this Raven took off.

In a Garry Kasparov-themed, machines are not perfect example… Matt did reveal a quite enjoyable flaw of sorts in the system when Everton were battered 4 - 0 by Southampton, but still, somehow, weren’t dead last. This was because so many fans were Tweeting out they were “happy” it was David Unsworth’s last match. Asked about other surprises, Matt cited his beloved Spurs and the fact they have been finishing relatively low on the mood table in recent weeks, even in instances where they haven’t been woeful.

“We’ve been spoiled the last couple of years. We expect to win every week, every match day.”